


In Whose Name I Came Calling

by fartherfaster



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 08:59:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4094908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If we don’t, who will?”</p>
<p>“No,” Sharon disagrees. “You and me aren’t SHIELD. That ground has been salted and burned, Maria. Nothing good can come from it. We’ll keep fighting, but we’ve gotta move on. We’ve gotta be something else.”</p>
<p>Maria leans forward on her elbows and sighs into her hands. The smoke of Madripoor’s ruins turned her blood black; it will take more than fire and rust to scare her away from her life’s work, from the hill she has long claimed as hers to die on.<br/>-<br/>Maria Hill in the light and in the dark.<br/>-<br/>Written for Captain Hill Week</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Whose Name I Came Calling

**Author's Note:**

> With a world of thanks to [blackglass](http://blackestglass.tumblr.com).

She has no greater cause, no metaphorical higher power. There is the dust in her boots and the blood on her hands; Maria has no patience for the God that isn’t watching, that doesn’t intervene. She has consummate evil burning instead in her city’s heavens. Human nature, she learned as a tender-skinned child, is a very dark thing cradled in every man’s chest.

It rains fire in Madripoor for three straight days. The blackness in her veins is the only reason she makes it out alive.

-

The scale of the terror they fight dwarfs them; all of SHIELD, all of her resources. Maria watches Captain Rogers, freshly awake and nothing but nervous energy, as he beats the ever-loving daylights out of several hundred pounds of sand.

Maria Hill does not believe in higher powers; there is enough darkness on Earth without omnipotent machinations beyond comprehension. It makes her tremble to see all that evidence revoked - a reaction she represses deeply within herself for the sake of clinging to any advantaged offered, damn her as it may.

Abraham Erskine made himself an artist by bringing such a _David_ to life. There is light in art, Maria thinks. Captain Rogers, with furious calm, sets his hands on the leather seams and shreds it like nothing more than tissue. Even the best parts of humans, though, those remain dark.

-

A medical tent is set up in the space where Thor has pushed the rubble aside. Maria watches him carry huge slabs of charred, blood-smeared concrete across his shoulders. In the quiet after the fight, he drops his burden and the whole street shakes. Banner - who tore up whole sheets of asphalt not a hundred yards from where he perches now, shirtless and dusty - doesn’t falter.

“You know,” she says, “you’re not actually licensed to practice medicine on US soil.”

Banner doesn’t look away from his slow, steady hands. Blood stains around each of his gloved fingertips, clinging to the threads he loops, ties, snips. “Believe it or not, you’re not the first person to mention that,” he agrees. “But I’m not the one you need to convince.”

Barton blinks at her. In eleven years she has never seen him sit peacefully for stitching. Over his shoulder Thor instructs Captain Rogers in the finer art of carrying wrecked civilisations, and they lumber slowly out of her view, dwarfed by the ruins they balance on their backs. She weighs the corners of Banner’s mild-mannered frown, wondering how Barton can trust gentleness delivered by such violent hands. Maria recognises the face of futility; she turns away from this battle and back to the war at large.

-

Grant Ward: the operative rogue, the breath that nursed the rot, and not the first man to call her Fury’s bitch. He is a slick and persistent slime; it takes them years to finally, finally cage him. Coulson, at his wits’ end - and in her indelicate opinion, out of hands to play with - demands that he be used one last time. Maria does not acknowledge the request, thinking of all the lives lost to his delusional hate. She gives him first to May out of loyalty. After, Maria tears apart what she leaves behind.

She steps out of the cell and spits. He is not the first man to die with his blood on her teeth; he will not be the last.

-

Some days are not all-out war. Some days, Maria reflects, are digging trenches. She pours herself another cup of coffee and then gestures with the carafe to Captain Rogers. He nods, standing to join her at the counter. The sky is an in-between wash of pale blues and pinks, the moon and sun balanced on opposite horizons. They are high up enough in the tower that Maria can’t tell where they are in the day, which phase will wax next. She pinches the bridge of her nose and takes a few hasty, burning sips of unadulterated coffee just for the shock of it.

Captain Rogers lays his palm on her shoulder and that more than does the trick.

Theirs is not a professional relationship without unprofessional tensions; she has noticed more than once his eyes lingering: the line of her calf, the flex of her ankle, the curve of a thigh holster. Once she had insisted they debrief while Wilson was still debriding a wide, aching burn, and he had stood near her cot and listened to her bare back while she recited everything she could before her adrenaline crashed and wiped the details of her memory. Once he had asked for mission parameters while still undergoing physiotherapy for a crushed shoulder; so she stood, handing him progressively heavier weights and critiquing his posture in the same breaths that delivered op specs, all while her own gaze wandered impolite.

The heat from his palm lingers on her bare arm. She can tell he’s going to suggest she sleep, close her eyes against the case, against the war. That she’ll recharge in the dark. ~~~~

“Go to bed,” he says, “you’ll feel better.”

Maria does not believe in higher powers, but she will always use the upper hand when it’s afforded to her. “Come with me.”

He stares at her eyes and Maria waits; when his gaze drops for just an instant to her mouth she counts her battle won, turning away from him. He follows her sedately to her quarters on the floor below, stepping into her shadow as she opens the door. Maria turns on her heel, putting all of her weight into her hands as she shoves him back against the door. He goes, pliant to her motions. She wants none of this offered softness from him and sets her teeth against his lips, curling her nails into the cut of his hips, digging for some reaction. She has seen him fight, seen him walk into Hell more than once with war yoked to his massive shoulders.  He claws himself out of his own shirt first, and as the buttons still skitter on her floor he fists the nape of his undershirt and hauls that over his head, too.

Maria spreads her palms across his belly and she doesn’t pray, doesn’t worship, but she wonders. She wonders what the world would look like if all men had their way, if it would all come down to brawn and brutality like the jumping muscles under her hands. Then she drags her teeth down the bulk of his chest as he heaves for breath in front of her. Rogers hisses, roughly gathering her wrists over her head, and peels Maria out of her t-shirt. His hands are warm, calloused and heavy where they span her ribs, and he holds her like a bird. Maria rears her head back, ready to stoke him into a fight, and the expression in his eyes chokes her voice.

He curls his fingers so slightly, the nails biting into her skin. Maria balances on the ends of her toes, exhilarated. “You want this,” he asks, dragging his nails in eight short, tight lines. Maria nods, holding in a moan.

Rogers reverses their positions so quickly her head spins, lifting her slightly and shifting his weight so that she’s pinched between his bulk and the wall behind the door, her thighs clamped around his hip and her feet several inches free of the floor. One palm skates up her sternum to press against her throat, his finger and thumb up behind her ears. He applies no pressure and is merely present; Maria wraps her hand around his wrist to end the stalemate and finds him immovable. She slackens her fingers and arches into the heat of his body.

“You want it like this?” he asks again.

Maria tightens her fingers once more around his forearm. She nods, and the motion gives way to a shiver.

Rogers tugs the straps of her bra down to her elbows, and then tucks one finger of his free hand under the gore, pulling the whole thing down to her waist. Maria’s nipples rise tight and hard in the cool air, and she arches again into his body heat. He cups his palm over one breast, grinds his hip into the seam of her jeans. She writhes, impatient. He pops the button of her fly and works his hand inside, smoothing his fingers over the slick folds and creases of her labia before finally curling in one finger, then another. Maria wants more, she wants to get her hands into his soft spaces and find out what’s underneath. She wants every hard line, every flexed muscle, every ounce of fight there’s ever been in his bones. She wraps her knees around his waist and pulls him closer.

He works her slowly to her first orgasm, drawing his fingers out fractionally and curling back into her heat. She shivers and Rogers grinds the heel of his hand against her swollen clitoris, a second wave building under the unrelenting stimulation. Maria grasps for purchase wherever she can find it, and he leans in close, his teeth sharp on the shell of her ear. “I wanna hear you say my name, Hill,” he tells her, backing off the pressure and dragging his fingers through the slick that pools outside of her body. “You’re not gonna come again until I hear you say it.”

He curls his fingers in again, one two three, without lacing them together, no effort made to soften the overwhelming stretch. It’s brutal and perfect and exactly not enough, not while his palm radiates heat against her clitoris and yet gives her no friction. She twists and arches under his hands, her sweaty shoulders sliding against the wall. Her thighs ache from the strain of spreading under unforgiving denim, and she is aware of all her trembles against Rogers’ stillness.

“Fuck,” she grits out, her hips rocking on the bone of his hip where he’s pinned her. “Fuck, Christ, please.” Saying his name is just another challenge, and Maria has already sunk her teeth into this one.

“No,” he laughs a little and fades out to breathing hot and wet against her neck. She tilts her head away, giving him space. She wants his teeth, she wants to come. “He ain’t listenin’, sweetheart. S’just me.” He twists his palm, lines up his fourth finger, trails it against her tender skin.

Maria inhales, tight and short and gasping. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she pants on every exhale.

“I know,” says Rogers, his voice soft in her ear. He draws his hand back, gathers his four fingers, and only pushes to the second knuckle before drawing back. Maria can scarcely remember what she was fighting for, in whose name she came calling. “I will,” says Rogers. Maria sighs, high and thin.

Four fingers, laced together, push in again.

“Please _,_ ” Maria says.

“I know,” he soothes her, “I know, sweetheart, I just wanna hear you say it. C’mon, honey.”

“ _Please._ ”

He mouths around her clavicle, breathes wet heat over her nipple before grazing it with his teeth. “Please who, Maria?”

Her fingers dig into his wrist and sweat stings the corners of her closed eyes. “Steve,” she begs, “ _Steve_ , please, I want. I just want-”

“I know,” he says, lining up the heel of his hand once more against her clitoris. Maria bucks up with the friction, and he moves with her. “I know,” Steve says. “C’mon, sweetheart. Lemme feel it, I wanna see you let go.”

Her orgasm rolls through her, wet fire along all her nerves that floods out through her whole body and pools at his hand. Steve breathes into her open mouth, and he wraps both arms around her slender frame and carries her further inside.

-

“Targets locked,” she barks into her headset. “Cap, get out of there!”

“Fire now!”

The sky billows smoke, the blackest rot of humanity is bleeding out from the groundwater, and Maria thinks there is so little goodness left, even as that goodness comes calling in the name of sacrifice and humility, asking for blood in ways that somehow hurt more. Wilson stands in her vision like a grounded angel. Rogers, however, is composed of a different kind of light; she’d taken him apart with her own two hands. He wore his darkness inwards and scarred only himself under the burden, under the ruins of who he thought he’d been.

Maria has watched herself under that same weight, and she came out of Madripoor with that darkness in her veins. Maria knows she was made to spill blood, but not in sacrifice, not like this. There is no higher power to revel in Rogers’ life; his death isn’t any kind of promise. It never was.

“But, Steve-”

The last time she’d said his name so softly he whispered back that he knew, that he understood her and what she needed.

This time he is unforgiving. “Do it! Do it now!”

Maria bows her head, swipes the lock, and depresses the key.

-

“You won’t stay?”

Sharon switches her phone to her opposite ear. “Mar,” she sighs, “there’s nothing left.”

Maria hums. “Officially, there isn’t,” she agrees.

Sharon’s breath catches. “Don’t tell me anything else. I don’t want to know.” She sits heavily at a bus shelter, buried in the bustle of people around her. She works her free hand out of its fist and asks, “Why?”

“If we don’t, who will?”

“No,” Sharon disagrees. “You and me aren’t SHIELD. That ground has been salted and burned, Maria. Nothing good can come from it. We’ll keep fighting, but we’ve gotta move on. We’ve gotta be something else.”

“Yeah.”

“Call Pepper,” Sharon encourages.

“Okay,” says Maria.

“Okay.” Sharon hangs up.

Maria leans forward on her elbows and sighs into her hands. The smoke of Madripoor’s ruins turned her blood black; it will take more than fire and rust to scare her away from her life’s work, from the hill she has long claimed as hers to die on.

-

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

This isn’t the first time one of them has slunk out of the bed in the still of night. It is the first time he’s kissed her shoulder before rolling away, though, like the action speaks volumes. He sits at the edge of the mattress and stews, caught by her voice. Maria doesn’t tell him ‘nightmares’ is a perfectly good response, instead waiting to see what he’ll offer. She never, never gives up an advantage.

“Tony said something,” he tells the ceiling. She watches as he lies back down beside her, hands at his sides. Another quiet moment passes, and he curls around her, facing away, his smooth cheek against her belly.

Maria cards her fingers through his hair, and it catches the moonlight like gold.

“He’s pissed because he thinks I don’t have a dark side.”

She thinks about the hundreds of ways she could answer the question he’s not asking. “Stark’s impatient,” she tells the back of his head.

Steve’s breathing stutters. He doesn’t try to leave the bed again that night.

-

 “Wouldya lookit this,” Barton says, craning his neck to catch Maria’s attention as she and Steve make rounds on the Avengers, rebooted and wounded still. Wilson growls for him to stop moving as he laces his flank back together.

Maria pauses; Steve stands at her shoulder and holds his own silent conversation with Natasha, who sprawls ungainly over the opposite cot, nursing several recently relocated joints.

“Sam’s even certified for this ridiculous shit,” Barton goads her. “Double-oh and everything else.”

“Bond is literally the worst example of a fictional spy you could pick,” Natasha complains. “Bang bang.”

“The only double-ohs you gon get are from your missus,” Wilson tells Barton, who’s still grinning at Natasha. “When we leave your dumbass on her nice porch in two pieces. Fuckin’ hold still.”

Maria remains unimpressed. Steve snorts; Natasha smacks a palm over her face, overcome with giggles.

-

They roll over and over in the bed until Steve finally catches her wrists and aligns his thigh with hers, pinning her still. He speaks directly against the skin of her throat and she can feel the fine edges of his teeth. “What’s got you so set on fighting?” he wonders aloud. “I mean, it’s fun,” he concedes, again curling a single finger inside of her, drawing her taut as a bowstring.

Maria pants for breath. “It’s not,” she grits out, words sticking to her tongue as he works in another finger, “fighting. It’s about being right.”

“Right?” he laughs a little, dragging his thumb back and forth over her clitoris. “What does fucking me prove?”

“Put your dick in me and we’ll find out,” she pants.

Steve laughs again, pulling her leg up over his shoulder and sliding home. She sets her nails against his skin and clenches around him until his rhythm stutters and his hips buck sharply up against hers. She uses every touch and muscle to her advantage, pulling bliss out of his body like a ribbon. He gives and gives and gives so sweetly and for so long that Maria thinks she misjudged him, but then as she catches the shell of his ear between her teeth and scores her nails down his chest something in him buckles, some great restraint falls slack, and he meets her with all the hunger she’s been tempting out of him. He holds her wrists above her head in one hand’s iron grip. The other he laces around her thigh, hiking it higher up around his hip. She arches beneath him and he drags his open mouth down the column of her throat, all of his soft words traded out for wet, filthy prayers.

Maria trembles in his arms until he rears back, his body sleek like an animal in the dark. He pushes against her again, deeper still, and grinds their bodies together, the fingers of both hands curling bruises into her flanks. Her release rolls through her, slow and blinding. Steve looms over her with all the dark heat of a summer night, and this is her answer. His words fall away to a long, low moan and Maria holds him closer, pulls her hands from his slackening grip and wraps her arms around his shoulders.

After a few shaky breaths, he presses his nose into the column of her throat, tracing the line of her jaw. She has the beginnings of bruises on one hip, and Steve sighs, crawling down her body to kiss them. “You okay?” He asks, his mouth warm against her thigh.

Maria hums. Everything in her head is quiet, the black thunder in her veins trembles in the stillness left behind. “You’re intense.”

Steve pushes her thighs over his shoulders, breathing hot on her wet skin. “Is that your answer?” He turns his head away and licks the sweat from the back of her knee.

 She reaches down to him, scoring a fingernail across the bulk and sinew of his shoulder. “You’re human.”

He stops, kisses her other knee in his distraction, and then crawls back up her body so they’re perfectly flush. He turns his face into the curve of her neck and Maria feels his heart thud against her skin. It’s an agreement and a challenge all at once; Steve showing her not with words but actions the equality between the bodies. He knows his worth and considers her his partner. Maria knows what such loyalty costs.

“Yeah,” she sighs, catching her breath. She tucks her face against his, and curling her arms across his ribs and her thighs above his hips, Maria seeks his lips for a kiss in the dark.


End file.
